Corn is one of the most valuable cash crops globally, with annual grain production in the United States alone valued at nearly $80 billion. Fungicides are widely used to protect crops and promote yield, but new research published in Phytobiomes Journal suggests we may be overlooking a hidden cost: the loss of beneficial fungi essential to plant health.

A new critical review, published in the journal CABI Agriculture and Bioscience, highlights the emergence and scientific basis of regenerative agriculture – proposing a working definition centred on ecological cycles and farm system outcomes.

Dr Nicholas Bardsley, author of the paper from the Department of Agri-Food Economics and Marketing at the University of Reading, suggests that as global agriculture faces intensifying soil degradation, climate disruption, and ecological breakdown, there is a need for a deeper re-evaluation of how food is produced and what it means to farm regeneratively.

The transition to agriculture in Europe involved the coexistence of hunter-gatherers and early farmers migrating from Anatolia. To better understand their dynamics of interaction, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the University of Fribourg and Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, combined computer simulations with ancient genetic data. The results show that population mixing increased locally over time during the Neolithic expansion, at each stage of the farmers’ advance along the “Danube route” toward Central Europe. Published in Science Advances, the study offers new insight into this pivotal period in human history.